The Florida Shooting Had All the Red Flags

Details are still unfolding in Wednesday's shooting at a Parkland, Florida, high school. But what we know already is tragic and heart-breaking. As of this writing, more than a dozen students are reported injured with an unconfirmed number of fatalities, and the local sheriff's department has confirmed that the shooter is in custody.

One of the classmates of the alleged shooter told local news that the student often showed a lot of warning signs, from showing off pictures of his guns to joking about knowing the layout of the school well enough to figure where students would be in case of a shooting.

Opponents of gun control will insist that it's too early to "get political," by which they will mean "discuss anything that could have prevented this" or "acknowledge that we have the power to change gun laws but we refuse to." They'll say that it's too soon to point out that Florida gun laws are some of the most relaxed in the country, meaning in Florida you can buy a gun without a license, you don't need firearms registration, and in most cases you don't need to go through a background check, including to purchase semi-automatic weapons. Acknowledging that it's less than two years since the Pulse in Orlando, the deadliest U.S. shooting in modern history when it happened, is "insensitive."

Opponents of gun control will say that we can't prevent every school shooting. What that means, tacitly, is "We shouldn't try to prevent any of them."

Update: An earlier version of this story mistakenly referred to the Orlando shooting as the deadliest in modern U.S. history instead of the deadliest in U.S. history up to that point in 2016. Since then the October 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas has broken that record, and we regret the error.

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